


Light Blue

by coffeeandoranges



Category: The Crown (TV)
Genre: Episode: S04E10 War, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-18 07:54:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28988814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeeandoranges/pseuds/coffeeandoranges
Summary: After the group photo, Diana and Margaret have a brief confrontation in her bedroom, about the usual topic. Missing scene.
Relationships: Diana of Wales (1961-1997) & Margaret Countess of Snowdon | Princess Margaret
Comments: 8
Kudos: 29





	Light Blue

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted a scene of Margaret and Diana interacting, and this is what came out. Thank you for reading.

Not ten minutes after she’s retreated back to her room, after the group photo, comes another knock on the door.

“I’m not coming, Charles. I’m tired.”

Not this again—her husband makes her feel positively adolescent every time she wants to be alone. This time she might even live up to his conceptions, tear-streaked as she is. As if to punctuate the point, Diana kicks off her pumps, each landing with a loud thump inches from the wardrobe.

( _You are a_ child, Charles told her, when she’d said she was going upstairs. _Not anymore I’m not_ , she’d told him. _I was when we were married._ _But Charles—I’m almost twenty six_.)

The door opens and it isn’t Charles, but Margaret, who look at the shoes on the ground with a bemused expression—or what passes for amusement on her. Only fifty seven, the princess looks much older, almost as old as the Queen Mother, a woman in her eighties.

“Do they want me to come back down?” Diana says in a tremulous voice from bed. She should stand up and curtsey (and Margaret will note any absence of courtesies) but Diana can’t find it within herself to get up.

“Yes,” says Margaret. “My brother-in-law sent me. It seems you’ve had one good talking-to today and he thought a second wouldn’t hurt.”

“From _you_.”

“Yes.”

From her prone position, Diana can hear rather than see the cocktail Margaret has brought in with her, the ice tinkling against the glass. Margaret takes a seat at the desk across Diana with a sigh.

“You know, I _know_ we are not the warmest bunch, but I don’t understand what makes even a minimum of socializing with us so very difficult.” 

“There are lots of reasons,” says Diana to the ceiling.

“Perhaps you need to adjust your expectations.”

“Oh, I know I do.”

Diana hears the flick of a lighter and cigarette smoke fills the air like perfume.

“What _were_ your expectations, coming into this arrangement?”

Diana fights the urge to cough. Fittingly, perhaps, Margaret’s cigarettes are all unfiltered. “For the family?”

“For marriage.”

Now Diana sits up, propping up her elbows on her knees. “I don’t think I had any.”

“You must have had at least one.”

Diana stares at her. “I expected my husband to be faithful to me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Margaret laughs. “I remember what it was like to be nineteen years old.”

“Is that so terrible?”

“Of course not. It’s only when we stay that way, even after the calendar has marched on.”

Diana never knows what to make of the Queen’s sister—she can be witty and even kind, sometimes, but there is nothing warm about her, as Diana discovered early on, when she called her by the affectionate nickname _Margo_ , and the princess had bristled as if shocked. Diana would never do that again.

“You think I’m a silly little idiot, don’t you?” Diana says, crossing her legs. “Like the others do.”

“No, I think you’re far shrewder than you let on.” Margaret shoots Diana a strange, intense look. “Manipulative, even.”

“When you want to be,” Margaret continues, ignoring Diana’s noise of indignation. “It’s not a bad thing to be.” She worries the edge of her lipstick with one manicured nail and shrugs. “It’s your choice in this world. You’re a woman; you can be a victim or a villainess, I’m afraid.”

 _What a sad thing to say._ Now Diana understands her a bit better, as if Margaret was someone in her line of sight, blurry and far away, and has just come into focus. For a moment she even feels a note of pity.

“I’m the heroine,” Diana says softly, lifting her jaw.

Margaret rolls her eyes. “I’m beginning to understand what my brother-in-law said about you.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He said you believe you’re the main character of this... circus. This five-act drama. But in this family, you must _bend_.”

Diana blinks away tears of frustration. Philip had said as much to her, when he’d come in and attempted fatherly advice, but she didn’t understand it any more now than she had the first time.

“I’ve done nothing but _bend_ for the sake of this family.”

Margaret laughs again, harsh and unfriendly. “You know nothing about _bending._ You don’t get your way for five minutes and you think it’s oppression.”

“I don’t think expecting my husband to be faithful to me is ‘not getting my way.’"

Diana hates that she’s fallen back into justifying herself.

“To you he may be your husband, but to the world he is the Prince of Wales. And princes—” Margaret says, smiling. “Do as they like.”

“And princesses do what? Look the other way? Lie back and think of England?”

Margaret rubs her temples. “You have no imagination.”

“Well, I tried handling my needs on my own, and that got me into trouble too, didn’t it? A man can do as he pleases, but god forbid a woman do the same, or even— seek comfort—”

“ _My_ husband two-timed me for most of our eighteen years before I ever dreamed of repaying the favor.”

“After which you were granted a divorce,” Diana says. She won’t let them play this game; the playing field is tilted and the comparison unfair.

Margaret raises an eyebrow. “I thought you were _so_ invested in making your marriage work.”

“I am. Of course I am.”

The old princess shifts her cigarette to the hand holding her drink, with the quiet focus of one engaged in a cherished ritual, and fleetingly Diana wishes she had a distraction of her own. The hopelessness of her position is hitting her again, like a black tide.

“Charles and I—I don’t know if we will make it to eighteen years or not,” Diana says, sounding sad even to her own ears.

“You can,” says Margaret, suddenly thoughtful, staring at the bookshelves. Smoke curls upward from her left hand.

“You make it through. Some days you can’t stand the sight of him, and the next you’re in the shop and you see something that looks just like him, so you put it away for his birthday, some bit of cologne or a watch.”

She looks back to Diana.

“You have those moments, don’t you?”

“Yes.” _Everything I try to do for him is wrong._ “I don’t think he does for me, though.”

“My own husband liked to leave love notes for me,” Margaret says serenely. “To remind me how ugly and unbearable I was. ‘You look like a Jewish manicurist’—that was one of his favorites.”

Diana frowns. “That’s horrible.”

“That was one of the kinder ones. How he hated me sometimes. I never understood why he married me. I think it was— to prove something. God knows what.”

“Lord Snowdon had another woman too.”

The princess nods. “That was far from the worst thing he did.”

Diana waits, but evidently Margaret is not willing to share what the ‘worst thing’ is—Diana remembers her own parents’ marriage, almost involuntarily, and can feel herself flinch.

“Why did you put up with it?”

“Because I loved my sister,” Margaret says. “I loved her so much I was willing to sacrifice my happiness for hers. I’m sorry your conception of love is so childishly limited.”

With that, Margaret snuffs out her cigarette; Diana feels chastised.

“Do come down to the drawing-room, whenever you are ready to rejoin us,” Margaret says, over her shoulder, and takes her leave.

//

Diana endures two more hours in the drawing-room—a card game, a drinking game, gossip about people she barely knows, a final round of liqueurs—before she’s able to say her goodbyes and insist on putting the boys to bed, as it is well past their bedtime.

As they leave, there come the braying tones of Anne, the one who enjoys these things the most, as far as Diana can tell—“But they’re on holiday!”

“Yes, well, even on holiday little children have their bedtimes.”

William’s face is puffy and Harry has been dozing in his grandmother’s lap for hours.

“Come on,” she tells them, feeling each little hand settle into hers.

 _You’re wrong_ , she thinks as she pulls the covers up their chins. _I know what love is, you bitter shrew._ For all her talk of sisterhood and sacrifice, Margaret was slowly killing herself, and the rest of the family didn’t seem to know or care (just like they never did, about anything.)

The noise of the party rumbles on downstairs, excluding her. For a moment Diana thinks about ringing Sarah, then has a laugh at that idea. It’s in all of them, this sickness, whatever it is that keeps them from seeing each other.

“You’re really all I’ve got,” she whispers to Harry, tucking a curl of red hair behind his ear. “All I’ve got in the whole world.”

And here now, this is the feeling she’s been chasing out there, in the darkness between each blinding camera flash, when all else melted away and people she didn’t know and never would cried to her, touched her, held her. _The family hates me for it, and they don’t even see how much I need it._

With the boys sleeping soundly now, she drifts back into the bedroom she would share with Charles, if he were ever there.

//

A few weeks later Diana comes across an old photograph in a magazine, of Margaret in a gown of light blue, its color reminiscent of the dress she’d worn in Australia.

 _I wore it better,_ she tells herself. Margaret had been pretty, once, but no one could match the Princess of Wales.


End file.
